The healing process

[gominokouhai]

The other night, after eighteen months, I logged into my university account.

The poor dears have been holding it for me, as if in the vain hope that someday I may return to sort their fucking lives out again. In England's hour of greatest need....

Several thousand unread messages—maybe I'll deal with those another time—and my essays. Oh, my essays.

Some of you may recall the Systems Design Project. Some of you may recall the vomitous torrent of bile, hatred and vitriol that I handed in as my report. The phrases obsolete hardware, could not charitably be described as cutting-edge and dysfunctional group dynamic abound.

Very few of the group members I found myself working with were people I would enjoy interacting with socially. In fact, I found most of them to be childish, arrogant and ignorant. Most of them displayed a disturbing lack of knowledge about the basic principles on which a Computer Science degree is based, and a similarly disturbing tendency to do things the easy way at any cost—as witnessed by their wild-eyed fear at the concept of a document preparation system without colourful clicky buttons to press, or their haste to install a Fisher-Price[sic] operating system when they discovered a tiny complication with Linux. These were not characteristics I expected from 3rd-year Computer Science students at a world-class university.

There is more. There is a footnote to the above passage, coming just after the word `arrogant'.

I use the word `arrogant' advisedly, since I am well aware that the rest of the group would probably use the same term to describe me. However, as indicated throughout the rest of this document, I was proven correct in my assertions on the vast majority of occasions. Moreover, I know perfectly well that my manner appears arrogant, and I attempt to counteract this with wit and charm. I am aware that this worked particularly poorly in the case of Sys Design, although whether this is due to my lack of wit and charm, or the other group members' lack of perception, is still debatable.

Damn. It wouldn't have hurt my word count too much just to add in ...would probably use the same term to describe me, if they knew what it meant.

Corporate whoredom

The following section contains a bulleted list of largely meaningless technical buzzwords to make you swoon. This is presented in the vain hope that some of the silly marketing mindset on which the entire project was based may have rubbed off on the marker.

• e-commerce.
• synergies.
• paradigm.
• bulleted.

That was the entire section.

But I do wrap up on a cheery note:

While I can not in all honesty say that I enjoyed participating in the Project, I am glad that it's over and I am glad that I don't have to do it again. This is roughly equivalent to being glad that I did it.

The whole thing is here if you're interested. (See, I can `host files' on my `web space' now. I have the technology.) I remain quite impressed that I managed to write 6,127 words and not one of them was `fuck'.

I handed that in and had a nervous breakdown two days later. On reflection, I can't say I'm at all surprised.

~

Oh, and if anyone can tell me what I was going on about in this document, I'd be much obliged if they could tell me. This was the one in which I fixed all of the problems inherent in the current approach to genetic algorithms and suggested a way forward based on common sense and less frenetic mid-nineties grubbing for research money.

I was some kind of fucking genius two years ago. Now I have very little idea what any of those words mean.